Bumping up the bitrate

Providing great sound quality has always been an important goal for us. When we launched last year we implemented what we think is a very nice sounding stream at 160 kbit/s. A little later on, after a lot of user feedback, we decided to make sound normalisation an optional setting for those who prefer their music unaltered. Now, we’re taking the next step in offering an unparalleled listening experience.

Today we’re really excited to announce that Spotify Premium users will be able to listen to music at double the current quality, this is the first of many new premium features we plan to launch. In the latest release of Spotify, premium users have the option to enable streaming at up to 320 kbit/s using the Ogg Vorbis q9 codec – the highest streaming rate for any online service.

If you are a premium subscriber you can enable higher quality streaming by going to the preferences menu and clicking “Enable high bitrate”.

Initially, not all tracks will be available at the higher bit rate. We’ve begun converting the most popular tracks first and over the next few of weeks and months we’ll be adding more and more high quality tracks until the entire catalogue is available in hi-fi.